Carlos Lobo de Oliveira

Carlos Lobo de Oliveira: magistrate, poet, and essayist. He held a degree in Law from the University of Lisbon, also attended the Military Administration course at the Army School, and served as chief clerk in the district of Beja and at the Supreme Administrative Court. He was interested in archaeological (a member of the Portuguese Archaeologists Association) and genealogical studies, publishing several works on these topics, notably a genealogy of Fernando Pessoa, in the Boletim da Academia Portuguesa de Ex-Libris (1963), which he edited. He made his literary debut at 17 in Teixeira de Pascoaes's magazine Águia, with poems imbued with the vague atmosphere of saudosismo. With collaborations spread across various newspapers and magazines, his modernist phase as a collaborator of Athena is noteworthy. It was in issue no. 4 of this magazine that his «ballet in 2 acts,» Christmas Cake, dedicated «a Ronald de Carvalho, Homero Prates, Agripino Grieco, Ruy Coelho, João do Amaral. José Osório de Oliveira, em lembrança de camaradagem no Brasil,» was published. A friend and companion of António Sardinha, sharing the same ideology, he was exiled with him in Madrid and Galicia, and later, in Rio de Janeiro. His first work, Roteiro das Saudades, bears witness to this forced absence and still owes something to Sardinha's inspiration, from which, incidentally, he later tried to free himself. In any case, all his poetry is bathed in the cult of a more or less archaic literary tradition, of a bucolism tinged with mystical colors, with clear marks of Bernardim, Bernardes, and Camões.